


what they call love is a risk.

by ohyellowbird



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Break Up, F/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-11-18 07:01:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11286108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohyellowbird/pseuds/ohyellowbird
Summary: “This is over,” he says, with his fingers working and his mouth working and his heart begging to be laid off.





	what they call love is a risk.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jandjsalmon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jandjsalmon/gifts).



“This is over,” he says, with his fingers working and his mouth working and his heart begging to be laid off.

The bathroom door is shut and the window’s open.

“Stop it…”

Her lavender colored towel is bunched against the underside of his wrist, her wet hair is soaking through the collar of his henley, her ribs are yawning under the pressure of his palm--Jughead fights to feel it all.

Betty is making transient circles against the mirror with her breath, one hand on the sink and the other reaching back, tethered in dark hair. “I can’t talk about this anymore,” she says in fractured beats. He stretches her with another finger and bites at the meeting of her jaw, pours over her while yearning for restraint.

The towel begins to slip, held up only where Jughead’s got Betty pinned over the sink. She has no mind for it, twists her hips back into the delicious distraction of his hand. But he keeps her fictitiously decent, readjusts to have her most precious parts hidden from him. Perhaps practice for later. For after, when they can’t do this anymore.

The futile chivalry is not appreciated. Betty goes stiff, catches his eyes in the mirror, “No,” and a moment later breaks away from him entirely. She is pervaded with anger. The towel drops and yet he is hooked by her lit stare, backing slowly out from the bathroom to where she’s left a pair of folded pajamas. She allows it to pool, unstirred by her own nakedness.“You don’t get to end things and then treat me like some treasured thing, Jug. It’s not fair.”

“Betty...it isn’t like I want this. Some things just can’t work.”

They’ve been having this fight for weeks and weeks. His dad needs him. They’re too different. He doesn’t want her bogged down by his reputation, doesn’t want anyone at odds with the Serpents to have a reason to hurt her. She says that none of that matters, that they’re bigger than sides of the tracks and petty gangs. But the argument never goes away, it never changes. 

Unstoppable force meet immovable object.

“You can’t have it both ways.” Her expression hurts but it’s the defeatism in her voice that startles Jughead, makes his eyes rounder, less tired. No explosion of dissent, no rational wheedling that they can do this and she knows it because of x, y, and z.

He’s turned it over in his own mind a million times, looked over every angle for a happy solution. There just isn’t one, at least not with the way things are, not right now.

“I know.”

And that’s it. They stay frozen for a moment, lapped at by waves of terrible understanding: this really is over. Then slowly, Betty pads off tile and onto carpet, and Jughead moves to sit, opens his hands before him in wait for her hips.

“I love you,” he says sadly as she closes in, feeds it to her like a cyanide pill kept as a tooth for all this time. 

Betty dampens his lap in a straddle, still wet from the shower. She gifts him her weight and they fall back, re-dissolve into the collaboratively slow-churned frenzy from before, when he snuck in. His hat hits the floor and wistfully she wonders if this is the last time he’ll let her see him without it. 

He watches as she dismantles him at will, peeling up his shirt first, but then leaving him half-dressed, attention on his pale throat and on the way he’s feeling up her thigh. She grinds down in a hypnotic swell of movement, pulled in tight against him by the hands kneading into her backside, and pants along the round of his shoulder when he fills her. 

“Betts…” Jughead sighs, thumbing her clit, making room for her hands on his belt. The side of his face is wet from her hair and he hopes that she doesn’t think he’s crying now, not while they have such little time. Betty mewls and surfaces for his mouth, yanks him by the arm, and he flips them. Jughead dips and kisses her sweetly, kisses her as though he’s been starved, kisses her through her shimmying his pants down his legs and onto the floor.

A heap of dark clothing looks strange within her cheery bedroom space, another example of divergence that she’d argue against. But the time for arguing is over and so instead she reaches down to feel him, thick and hard, but never impatient. His hand on her knee is a suggestion, fingers stroking the soft underside, and she complies, spreads wide and allows him to place pressure there. 

She is pinned open like a butterfly and Jughead looks and looks, drunk on pale skin. “Love you, Jug,” she whispers, her thumb passing gently along his cheekbone, and he gives over his eyes, meets her own and in another moment eases inside.

They move together languidly at first, both intent on the slow drag-pull of their bodies, kissing and not, just feeling this. Betty plays at the hair on Jughead’s nape with her fingers, pushes the toes of her raised leg into the side of his thigh. He’s propped up on his forearm and tracing the perfect curve of her lip, the arc of her jaw. 

She makes sound, but just barely, in rhythm with his shallow thrusting, and he has to smile. Because she was his once, and for right now, she still is.

It’s a lovemaking letter to the last few months, but eventually their reverie breaks down, hands sinking into sheets, made over into fists. Jughead seals one over her mouth when she gets loud, lets her bite into the meat of his palm. “ _Fuck._ I love you, Betty,” bleeds out of him, over and over without hope of a tourniquet. And she gasps her own love back, when she’s able, when he isn’t covering her mouth. 

Her legs end up against his shoulders, her body folded double, the heat of her everywhere. Greedily, she grips at him, cumming hard, and he follows just after, sounding wounded. They fall together down a rabbithole without walls or a bottom. Everything is humming and white and quiet, and only gradually does the universe again take shape around them.

Betty is still damp, but with sweat, and so is he, but he’s loathe to detach from her. They merely rearrange slightly to lie in the brightness of her room, with the window open, and they breathe.

The outside air spills in, cold and sobering.

It’s Betty who speaks first, much later, “Just stay for tonight. Please. And then…” but Jughead doesn’t let her finish, kisses her with a quiet finality and turns her away, spoons up behind her while she’s busy reaching for the light and presses a kiss to the flushed back of her hairline.

“Goodnight, Betty.”

**Author's Note:**

> hi! this is my first bughead fic, so i apologize if it's horribly done. i was roped into this fandom by the endlessly lovely jandjsalmon. and because sad is what i do best, i wanted to write a sad for her. love you, girl!


End file.
